Jason Grumet, founder and president of BPC, is respected on both sides of the aisle for his innovative approach to improving government effectiveness. Grumet’s first book, City of Rivals: Restoring the Glorious Mess of American Democracy, was released in September 2014.

Olympia Snowe is a BPC senior fellow and co-chairs its Commission on Political Reform. With her election to the U.S. Senate in 1994, Snowe began an 18-year career in the Senate. She was the first woman in U.S. history to serve in both houses of a state legislature and both houses of Congress.

Henry Cisneros co-chairs BPC’s Housing Commission and BPC’s Immigration Task Force. In 1981, Cisneros became the first Hispanic-American mayor of a major U.S. city, San Antonio, Texas. In 1992, President Clinton appointed Cisneros to be Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

G. William Hoagland is a senior vice president at BPC. Hoagland has completed 33 years of federal government service. From 1982 until 2003, Hoagland was a staff member of the Senate Budget Committee, serving as that committee’s staff director from 1986 to 2003.

Condoleezza Rice co-chairs BPC’s Immigration Task Force. She is currently a professor of political economy in the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a professor of political science at Stanford University. From January 2005-2009, Rice served as the 66th Secretary of State.

Former Senator Byron L. Dorgan is a BPC Senior Fellow and co-chairs BPC’s Energy Project. He served as a congressman and senator for North Dakota for 30 years before retiring from the U.S. Senate in 2011. He served in the Senate leadership for 16 years.

Thomas H. Kean is former governor of New Jersey (1982 to 1990). As governor, he served on the President’s Education Policy Advisory Committee and as chair of the Education Commission of the States and the National Governor’s Association Task Force on Teaching.

Dan Glickman is a BPC senior fellow, and he co-chairs its Commission on Political Reform, Democracy Project, Prevention Initiative, and Task Force on Defense Budget and Strategy. Glickman served as the U.S. secretary of agriculture from March 1995 until January 2001.

Pete V. Domenici is a BPC senior fellow, and he co-chaired its Debt Reduction Task Force, Health Care Cost Containment Initiative, and Task Force on Defense Budget and Strategy. Domenici served as a senator from New Mexico longer than any other person.

Doctor and Senator Bill Frist is a BPC senior fellow and he co-chairs its Health Project. He is both a nationally recognized heart and lung transplant surgeon and former U.S. Senate Majority Leader. Frist represented Tennessee in the U.S. Senate for 12 years.

BPC in the News: The Best of this Week’s Press, January 21-25

Christopher Snow Hopkins in National Journal:

“Earlier this month, Katherine Hayes was named director of health policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a redoubt of pragmatism and a repository of elder statesmen (including six former Senate majority leaders). In recent years, the center has resurrected the ideal of bipartisanship and demonstrated the efficacy of extra governmental public policy mills.”

Besides being painful in the short run, sequestration cuts would have little beneficial impact in the long run, said Shai Akabas, senior policy analyst with the Bipartisan Policy Center. He said they would not solve many of the country’s long-term budget problems.

Akabas said the current plan – to cut each budget line item by a certain percentage – would be “chaos.” He noted, for example, that a cut to the defense budget would not slow the growth of veterans benefits, even though they are expected to soon exceed current personnel costs.

Phoenix Mayor Stanton, second from left, with Aerospace Industries Association Vice President Cord Sterling, Bipartisan Policy Center analyst Shai Akabas and Senate aide Darrel Thompson, left to right, after a meeting on the effects of looming federal budget cuts. (Cronkite News Service photo by Connor Radnovich)

All this could lead to more turbulence for a market that’s already nervous about the debt-ceiling standoff. “Markets don’t like new things,” Bell said. “It is not only different, it raises all sorts of uncertainties that will have some discernible impact on short-term rates and market behavior.”

“The beauty of a pendulum is that once set in motion it can swing predictably forever. The difficulty is getting it to return to the middle. This seems to be the problem with regulation of derivatives.”

“The debt limit bill has always been politically sensitive. But as the country’s debt has continued to increase as a share of our economy, the need to legislate an increase in the debt limit has become more frequent and more difficult. Since 1940, Congress has increased the debt limit 78 times and based on the actions at the end of the 112th Congress, I estimate that the debt held by the public will continue to rise, reaching 77% by 2022. This must be addressed.”

Byline: 9854

Publish Date: 2013-01-25 00:00:00

Subhead: In case you missed it, here’s what they’ve been saying about BPC this week